Chance and coincidence rule this world, but his characters hope for more. As Seth Peake, the young, talented violinist in The Aerodynamics of Pork, says, "It's fairly hard to be a fag without nursing some hope that the social structure will change."

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Gale's background is as varied and as colorful as those of his characters. Born in 1962 on the Isle of Wight, he was educated at Winchester and Oxford. Between 1979 and 1985, he worked as a waiter, a cook, a temporary typist, a singer with the London Philharmonic Choir, and a bone-sorter for an archaeological team. He describes writing as both "an addiction and a livelihood."

At once tightly structured and loosely episodic in its survey of comic characters, Ease (1985) tells the story of Domina Tey, a successful playwright who has reached an impasse in her work and her life. Leaving Randy, her lover of some years, she takes a room in a rundown Bayswater boardinghouse.

As she enters the lives of her fellow boarders--a "houseful of faggots, morticians, tarts and Trappist monks," she calls them--Domina gathers material for a new play and attempts to experience new depths of being. She learns that it is more difficult and more tragic to manipulate the lives of real people than the lives of characters.

The Aerodynamics of Pork (1985) deftly weaves together several story lines, the main threads of which involve searches for love.

Seth Peake is eagerly anticipating his first serious lover, whom he finds in a twenty-one-year-old sculptor in Cornwall; Venetia, his older, still virgin sister, is experiencing a hysterical pregnancy; Huw Peake, their theologian father, suffering from "DeQuincey headaches," has collapsed into near madness and is raiding the houses of astrologers and stealing their current working notes and forecasts; and Mo Faithe, a lesbian police inspector, is searching for both the astrology thief and someone to love, since Maggie, her first lover, has died in an accident.

By its final pages, the novel has woven all these threads together into a clear affirmation of gay and lesbian loves.

In Kansas in August (1987), Hilary and Henrietta (Henry) Metcalfe, brother and sister, find themselves involved with the same man, Rufus Barbour, a cheery bisexual, and with a baby boy Hilary finds abandoned outside a subway station.

The cross-cutting between plots may have been artificial at times in the earlier novels, but here Gale has fully mastered the cuts, juxtapositions, and simultaneities. And, like the first two novels, Kansas in August fully exploits the mistaken and misrepresented identities, coincidences, and festivities, though it turns darker in tone as the characters are stripped of dreams and illusions.

Indeed, from this point on, Gale's novels move into darker, less festive comedy, more bizarre characters, and less hopeful resolutions.

Combining elements of incongruity, theatricality, and exaggeration, camp is a form of humor that helps homosexuals cope with a hostile environment.

Homosexuality, both male and female, has a rich, divergent, and increasingly open expression in the literature of the twentieth century.

Since World War II, the gay male novel has progressively flourished in England and especially in America.